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[Editor’s note: We’re bringing back price theory with our series on Price Theory problems with Professor Bryan Cutsinger. You can view the previous problem and Cutsinger’s solution here and here. Share your proposed solutions in the Comments. Professor Cutsinger will be present in the comments for the next two weeks, and we’ll again post his proposed solution shortly thereafter. .. MORE
Featured Comment
Money and Inflation
In a recent post, Tyler Cowen offered the following criticism of my views on inflation: More seriously, Scott seems to dismiss the price level concept altogether. For instance he once wrote: “In the past, I’ve frequently argued that inflation is an almost meaningless and useless concept. I’m not even aware of any coherent definitions of .. MORE
Economics of Health Care
How I removed squatters in less than a day. from Outside the Box with Flash Shelton, from more than a year ago. Hard to excerpt. The guy tells how he creatively and non-violently (and even somewhat humanely) got squatters out of his house so that he could put it on the market. The Best .. MORE
Entrepreneurship
If you urgently want a product from somewhere in the free world and you are willing to pay the price, the worst “shortage” you will experience is the cost of flying there or hiring a “personal shopper.” As I previously wrote in response to an EconLog comment, “if you were willing to pay and you .. MORE
Finance
How I saved almost half my gross salary by living like a graduate student for a little over a year. Kevin Corcoran’s post on toasters today was excellent. Early in the piece, he talked about how he managed to spend little money when furnishing an apartment. He didn’t say much about what his income was .. MORE
Economic Growth
Watch what they do, not what they say. Government officials frequently tell us that global warming is an existential threat. And yet when it comes to public policy, the issue is treated almost as an afterthought. For example, the US currently blocks the importation of Chinese electric cars. If BYD’s excellent and very inexpensive EVs .. MORE
Business Economics
Not long ago, Vice Presidential candidate and now Vice President-elect J.D. Vance asserted that “a million cheap, knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.” There’s a lot wrong with this comment – see this Reason essay pointing out some of the issues with what Vance is saying. But I want .. MORE
Explore the lasting legacies and
continued relevance of our classic titles.
Bloggers David Henderson, Alberto Mingardi, Scott Sumner, Pierre Lemieux, Kevin Corcoran, and guests write on topical economics of interest to them, illuminating subjects from politics and finance, to recent films and cultural observations, to history and literature.
Browse our archive of posts by author last nameEconomic Growth
Over a century ago, John Maynard Keynes, an economist and critic of unregulated, unmanaged markets, pointed to the miracle that one could order the wonders of the world over the phone while lying in bed and have them delivered: The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various .. MORE
Economics of Health Care
How I removed squatters in less than a day. from Outside the Box with Flash Shelton, from more than a year ago. Hard to excerpt. The guy tells how he creatively and non-violently (and even somewhat humanely) got squatters out of his house so that he could put it on the market. The Best .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
“What is needed is a fresh attempt to articulate a radical liberal vision that recovers not the details but the original essence of classical liberalism: democracy and markets.” – Don Lavoie, Democracy, Markets, and the Legal Order: Notes on the Nature of Politics in a Radically Liberal Society Liberalism is democratic Writing in 1993, the .. MORE
So we have a way of telling which political activists actually care about society and which are merely trying to portray themselves as caring: The ones who actually care will exert significant effort to make sure that their beliefs are correct. —Michael Huemer, Progressive Myths,1 p. 212 Michael Huemer believes that some important components of .. MORE
Unlike chimpanzees, which acquire the vast majority of their daily calorie intake from easy-to-find foods such as fruit and leaves, early humans occupied a more complex foraging niche, relying on foods they had to either extract (e.g., buried tubers, or nuts inside shells) or hunt. These more complex foraging techniques take time and skill to .. MORE
A Liberty Classic Book Review of L’Individualisme économique et social. Ses origines, son évolution, ses formes contemporaines (Economic and Social Individualism: Its Origins, Its Evolution, Its Contemporary Forms), by Albert Schatz.1 Albert Schatz (1879-1940) was a professor in the Faculty of Law of the University of Dijon in France. His 1907 book L’Individualisme économique et .. MORE
Thomas Stearns Eliot. Photo by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1934. Although the most illustrious honors in economics, such as the Nobel Prize, are typically awarded to specialists in the field, many of the most penetrating economic insights do not come from economists. To look exclusively to economists for economic insights would be as misguided as expecting .. MORE
Some people are against all immigration, but the majority of complaints are about illegal immigration. Conflating the two is one of the reasons it's difficult to take the open border types seriously. Legal immigrants (my..
TMC, December 30